Rangers' Brandon Prust (from left), Aaron Voros and Artem Anisimov watch the Flyers celebrate the shootout win that put them in the playoffs and kept the Blueshirts out.AP

PHILADELPHIA – The carriage on which they arrived turned into a pumpkin. Their glass skates became lead boots. It’s not that the party is over for the CinderRangers, it’s that they couldn’t get an invitation to the ball.

The Blueshirts’ three-week joyride came to a halt here today in a head-on collision with the Flyers that resulted in a demolition of hope, the season, and the opportunity to rewrite the history of this disappointing and difficult year that ends without a Rangers’ playoff appearance for the first time since the lockout.

And it all came to an end in the cruelest way possible, by way of a shootout in which the gallant Henrik Lundqvist, who had been the singular reason the Blueshirts had been able to survive the regulation 60 minutes, yielded two goals on three shots while his teammates were able to score once against Brian Boucher.

“It’s an empty feeling,” Chris Drury said after the 2-1 elimination defeat that ended with Boucher stopping Olli Jokinen after Claude Giroux had beaten Lundqvist five-hole off a stutter-step move. “We’d been on this big upswing for three weeks, and to kind of have it just crash is very difficult to take.

“As bad as we all feel, I think we all really feel for Hank. We all understand what he meant to us in this game and all season.”

Lundqvist, whose team was outshot 18-4 in the first and 47-25 overall in the one-sided affair, admitted to being, “dead tired,” entering the penalty shot competition. Daniel Briere beat him off a nifty deke before Mike Richards’ shot went wide. Erik Christensen was stopped on a blocker save before P.A. Parenteau (3-for-3 on the year) pulled the Rangers even after the second round.

But then Giroux scored and Jokinen, who has outstanding shootout stats (5-for-9 with Calgary this year) couldn’t get it done anymore than he was able to get much of significance done in his 26 games wearing the Blueshirt.

“Going into the shootout, I was pretty beat up,” said Lundqvist. “It was a tough, intense game, but I tried to focus and tried to be patient, but they made two good moves.

“The season is over and it sucks.”

The season is over and it was a failure, nothing more and nothing less, despite the admirable 7-1-1 run that kept the season alive through 81 games and, as it turned out, 65 minutes of Game 82. And though today’s game was lost in the skills competition, the playoff berth that went instead to the Flyers was actually lost through months of aimless play and incoherent coaching.

The Rangers, you’ll recall, opened the season 7-1. They closed it 7-1-2. In between those streaks, the Blueshirts won 24 of their 64 games, going 24-31-9.

“It should never have come to this,” said Brandon Dubinsky. “With our start and finish, what really hurt us was everything in between.

“We had opportunities all year and we couldn’t get it done.”

The Rangers led 1-0 from 3:27 of the first, when a Michal Rozsival shot glanced in off Jody Shelley, until 6:54 of the third, when Matt Carle barreled to the net to convert a power play rebound. But the Blueshirts did nothing with the lead.

The Dubinsky-Christensen-Marian Gaborik line was stifled. Gaborik rarely had the puck and never was able to gain the zone with speed matched against the Carle-Chris Pronger pair. The Shelley-Artem Anisimov-Brandon Prust unit had a couple of shifts down low, but by and large the Blueshirts generated nothing.

“I can’t put my finger on it, but we were a little tentative,” said Dubinsky. “We’ve been playing must-win games for a while, so we should have approached it the same way, but in the end it was a Game 7 [situation] and nobody wanted to make a mistake.”

But mistakes were made, a season of them. And now it is over. The uniforms have turned to rags, the carriage into a pumpkin.